He’d been carrying an old Webley .450 revolver in his jacket pocket at the time of his arrest, and he was subsequently charged and found guilty under the 1925 Firearms Act. Kelly was sentenced to three years at Mountjoy in Dublin, and although the conditions were bad enough, there was again far worse to be found elsewhere. Stories of some prisoners’ treatment at Portlaoise Prison in County Laoighis, for example, were sobering indeed — men kept in solitary confinement for years on end, forbidden to speak and with no contact at all with the outside world. It was rumoured the guards even wore rubber-soled boots so as not to break the total silence in which the incarcerated men were kept… by comparison, Mountjoy didn’t seem so bad at all.
Kelly had made sure he kept his nose clean in prison, and had served his time staying out of any trouble. Not surprisingly however, his good behaviour had nevertheless had counted for little in securing his actual release. His immediate transfer to The Curragh following the completion of his sentence hadn’t been any real shock, as the practice was common at the time under Eamonn de Valera’s Fianna Fáil Government. Nevertheless, it was still a cruel blow to a man’s spirit, and some of the men interned there had been detained indefinitely, without any formal sentence or charge, supposedly held and at the Irish Government’s leisure due to an ongoing ‘state of emergency’. The authorities knew how highly-placed Kelly had been within the Army Council, and that made it unlikely he’d be walking free any time soon.
Kelly had spent most of that morning and afternoon so far doing exactly what he’d done most days since his internment at ‘Tintown’… nothing. The concentration camp had been expanded in a rush amid an unexpectedly huge influx of political detainees, brought on by the Emergency Powers Act of January 4, and the overloaded facilities were sparse and primitive to the point of almost non-existence. Most men there spent their days aimlessly wandering about or talking, and most tried to stay out of trouble: the threat of a visit to the ‘Glasshouse’, where troublesome internees were taken to have the error of their ways ‘explained’, was incentive enough to keep most on the ‘straight and narrow’.
“Thought you’d be at one o’ the lectures, Eoin,” Tomás Glynn observed beside him, the usual hint of mischief in his light voice. “Difficult to decide which one to choose: Martin teaching Gaelic, or German with Seamus — German should come in handy, all right! Or, we could sit about and watch our two brilliant commanding officers argue as usual.” While Kelly was thin and wiry, Glynn was somewhat taller, five years younger, and somehow managed to remain moderately overweight despite the poor standard and amounts of food with which they were provided at the camp. Like many there at the Curragh, Glynn had ostensibly been sentenced by Military Tribunal for simply ‘refusing to answer questions’, but that in itself meant little — it was unlikely any of the men there would see freedom again until the government decided that the current ‘emergency’ had subsided.
“Oh yes, that sounds far too hard to pass up, doesn’t it now!” Kelly shot back with even sarcasm. “I already speak Gaelic, as I’m sure you’ll notice, and I’m sure I don’t need to watch Mulligan and Grogan in their daily pissin’ contests either!” He gave a snort of derision. “I wouldn’t be thinkin’ there was much use in learning German either, if I was you — they’ve not proven to be much use to The Cause so far!”
“They’d be mad not to help us — when the British Empire’s done with, it’ll give them some friends in the Republic.”
“‘The Republic’…?” Kelly’s tone wasn’t as confident as he’d have liked. “I’d not be so damned confident that the English will fold up so easily, or that the Republic will follow as a matter o’ course either,” he snorted angrily. “The Germans have been next to bloody useless so far, anyway — two of their agents picked up within days of getting’ here, and the new fella hasn’t had much luck so far either, other than stayin’ one step ahead of the Garda.” He shook his head, frustrated by life, and the times in general. “It’s not like the old days, Tomás: even if the Germans do get their act straight… would they want to help us?”
“What’re y’ talkin’ about, Eoin?” The man was genuinely stumped by Kelly’s statement as they stood in the lee of a barracks wall, sheltering from the wind.
“Doin’ bank raids now…! For the love of God, Tomás, I know the money from America’s dried up because of the war, but we never had to stoop that low when I joined The Cause. Things have been goin’ straight to shite since the raid on the Magazine Fort, man! They’ve been rolling us up all over the country, and we’ve been losing supply dumps from here to Tralee and back to the point where the Council thinks they’ve got back more ammo from us than we actually took at the Fort! There’s more of us in Mountjoy and Portlaoise, and here at the Curragh now, than there are out on the streets just about, and they pick more of us up every bloody day!” Kelly suddenly felt very tired — tired in spirit as much as he was physically. He leaned across, placing a steadying hand against the side of the barracks wall as his other hand rubbed nervously across his own forehead. “Twomey and Killeen and so many others stuck behind bars, while the Councils fight with each other instead of the real enemies! Seriously, man… even if the Germans do find some money or arms to spare, d’you really think we’re going to impress them enough to help us as it stands at the moment?”
“Give ‘em time, Eoin… and give us time too! Surely they’ll find something to spare for us to help with knocking off the British.”
“It’s a lovely dream, Tomás, but I’d be much happier if there was something to suggest it’ll ever be anything more than that,” Kelly observed pointedly, some of his strength returning as he spied a common enemy in the distance. He nodded in the direction of the main gates, where a pair of Austin sedans had pulled up a hundred metres away. The ramshackle lines of wooden barracks surrounded by lines of barbed wire and not much else provided little to keep the mind interested, and any out of the ordinary event tended to attract the attention of everyone within range.
“Looks like we’ve some visitors,” Glynn agreed as everyone nearby stopped to stare. They looked on as two of the men in the lead sedan climbed out and walked up to the gates, and even from that distance, Kelly recognised one of them.
“Harriers,” he observed, meaning Ireland’s Special Branch officers. “Wonder who they’ve come to see.” He didn’t add that the man he’d recognised, Jim Crofton, was one of the Republicans’ own men ‘on the inside’. That was information he’d picked up while working under Seán O’Brien, and it was something that precious few were aware of. He certainly wasn’t going to start spreading it about within the camp — never telling when an informant might be listening, after all.
“Probably comin’ for you, Eoin — Military Tribunal will be goin’ to charge you again over that ugly bloody face o’ yours.”